In my work as a Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, I have many
opportunities—in both individual and couples therapy—to engage in the struggles
of human suffering, and as many opportunities to test my compassion. In the
following, I attempt to reflect on my own current encounter with the problem of
suffering in my field of work. Prominent for me is the North American fear of even
the topic of suffering. An American dread of suffering, based on ignorance about
what suffering teaches and how it can be transformed, has recently led to more and
more physicalistic and materialist explanations of our pain and adversity. Instead of
recognizing the role of subjective distress—the ways in which disappointment,
anguish, fear, envy, pride, and hostility, for instance, contribute to our suffering—
the American anti-suffering campaign now addresses people at the level of
neurotransmitters, organ transplants, genetic engineering and biological
determinism. This cultural movement has already had massive ill-effects on the
practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy over the past two decades in the United
States, as I shall illustrate.
Particularly significant for me is the medical context that has come to surround
the practice of psychotherapy. This context demands that therapeutic interventions
be brief, and assumes that long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy is of little benefit,
especially for those people who have severe psychological difficulties. Only
medication, electroconvulsive treatment, and/or brief behavioral interventions are
promoted as truly effective. This cultural mood in America is especially the product
of the decade of the 1990s and the dominance of the pharmaceutical industry in
medical practices.
This mood is now expressed as a demand that human miseries be treated as quickly
as possible. So-called ‘managed care’ and other stripped-down services for the ill and
emotionally troubled have derailed both psychodynamic and humanistic therapeutic
movements. In the twenty years prior to these influences, psychodynamic and
humanistic psychologies had begun to encourage Americans to look into their
suffering with a kind of interest that leads, inevitably I believe, to spiritual yearnings
in the effort to resolve suffering for oneself and others. Psychodynamic and humanistic
therapies have now lost their ability to persuade the public, to acquire any substantial
funding for systematic research, and to be fully included in most medical settings. In
our current cultural zeitgeist, a new form of scientific materialism—biological
determinism—has taken hold of the public imagination.
In this same period of time that this has been unfolding, Buddhism has become a
major religious and cultural movement in North America in a way that no one could
have easily anticipated in the early 1970s. As a result, Buddhism (especially in its
popular Western forms of Zen, Vipassana, and Tibetan Buddhism) has, perhaps
surprisingly, opened up the possibility of a renewed appreciation of psychodynamic
practices of psychotherapy. Because Buddhism presents a spiritual argument for the
transformation (not the medication) of suffering, as well as specific and systematic
methods of analyzing subjective distress, it now assists me in being able to address
audiences about the principles and uses of analytic psychotherapy. Buddhism has
much to offer psychotherapists, and those who seek help from them. Buddhism has
66 POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH